Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village » (New Edition)

Mimi Schwartz is the author of five books, including Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, available in a Bison Books edition, and Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (with Sondra Perl). Her essays have been widely anthologized and six of them have been Notables in Best American Essays. A professor emerita at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, Schwartz teaches workshops in memoir and creative nonfiction nationwide and abroad.

Mimi Schwartz grew up on milkshakes and hamburgers—and her father’s boyhood stories. She rarely took the stories seriously. What was a modern American teenager supposed to make of these accounts of a village in Germany where, according to her father, “before Hitler, everyone got along”? It was only many years later, when she heard a remarkable story of the Torah from that very village being rescued by Christians on Kristallnacht, that Schwartz began to sense what these stories might really mean. Thus began a twelve-year quest covering three continents as Schwartz sought answers in the historical records and among those who remembered that time. Welcomed into the homes of both the Jews who had fled the village fifty years earlier and the Christians who had remained, Schwartz heard countless stories about life in one small village before, during, and after Nazi times. Sometimes stories overlapped, sometimes one memory challenged another, but always they seemed to muddy the waters of easy judgment.

 

How, this book asks, do neighbors maintain a modicum of decency in such times of political extremism when fear and hatred strain the bonds of loyalty and neighborly compassion? How do we negotiate evil and remain humane when, as in the Nazi years, hate rules?

Sonya Huber

"Schwartz puts at center stage not a sweeping generalization about 'The Germans' but its opposite, an open question that invites the reader to examine his or her moral conduct toward 'neighbors,' and to imagine oneself in the shoes of the various speakers and voices in the book. Schwartz raises large questions, too, about the nature of history, asking whether the flavor and essential, complex truth is lost when the stories of first-hand sources are squeezed into an historical narrative devoid of subjectivity."

-Sonya Huber, author of Opa Nobody

List of Illustrations     xiii
Author's Note     xv
Close to Home
Treadmill to the Past     3
Anonymous Translation     8
At the Nachmittag     17
Kaffeeklatsch     24
Joie de Vivre     35
Four Stories of the Torah     48
The Revolving Room     59
An Ocean Away
Off the Record     75
A Little Respect, Please     95
The Good Raincoat     102
Hedwig, Fritz, and "Schtumpela"     113
The Second Generation     122
Back and Forth
Willy from Baltimore     139
Five Kilometers Away     151
Katherine of Dorn     164
Truth Transposed     175
What Willy's Neighbor Says...     177
The Red Album     180
Where Legend Ends     193
At My Father's Grave     203
End Points
The Other Miriam     213
Three Little Girls     221
Yes or No?     234
The Celebration     243
Acknowledgments     259